1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to processing systems, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for minimizing memory barriers when enforcing strongly-ordered requests in a weakly-ordered processing system.
2. Background
Computers and other modern processing systems have revolutionized the electronics industry by enabling sophisticated tasks to be performed with just a few strokes of a keypad. These sophisticated tasks often involve a number of devices that communicate with one another in a fast and efficient manner using a bus. The bus provides a shared communication link between devices in a processing system.
The types of devices connected to a bus in a processing system may vary depending on the particular application. Typically, the sending devices on the bus may be processors, and the receiving devices on the bus may be memory devices or memory mapped devices. In these systems, the processors often achieve performance benefits by allowing memory operations to be performed out-of-order. For example, a sequence of memory operations could be reordered to allow all operations to the same page in memory to be executed before a new page is opened. Processing systems that are allowed to reorder memory operations are generally referred to as “weakly-ordered” processing systems.
In certain instances, the reordering of memory operations may unpredictably affect program behavior. For instance, an application may require a processor to write data to memory before the processor reads from that memory location. In a weakly-ordered processing system, there is no guarantee that this will occur. This result may be unacceptable.
Various techniques have been employed for executing ordered memory operations in a weakly-ordered processing system. One technique is simply to delay certain memory operations until all memory operations before it are executed. In the previous example, the processor may delay issuing a read request until it receives an indication that guarantees that the data has been written to the memory location. Another technique is to use a bus command referred to as a memory barrier when an ordered memory operation is required. A “memory barrier” may be used to ensure that all memory access requests issued by a processor before the memory barrier are executed before all memory access requests issued by the processor after the memory barrier. Again, in the previous example, a memory barrier could be sent to the memory by the processor before issuing a read request. This would ensure that the processor writes to memory before it reads from the same memory location.
Both techniques are effective, but inefficient from a system performance perspective. The memory barrier may be particularly inefficient in processing systems with multiple memory devices. In these processing systems, a memory barrier would need to be issued by the processor to every memory device it can access to enforce an ordering constraint on memory operations. Thus, there is a continuing need for more efficient methods to perform ordered memory operations in a weakly-ordered processing system.